A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, we briefly experimented with setting up our own Digg-style news aggregator website thingie, a place where you, our listeners and readers, could submit the anime/manga/Japan/whatever related stories that you found particularly interesting. This short-lived experiment ended in failure, as the only people who frequented that site were dirty rotten scoundrels spammers and their bots. Plus the server-side software we were using for this site turned out to be hard to configure and rather finicky and difficult to maintain. But I still had a secret longing in the back of my mind for a Digg-type site where people could come and submit anime-related news articles or content of any kind. Then I heard about reddit, and more importantly, the concept of subreddits. And so I decided to set one up for Otaku no Podcast.

The idea is that once you’ve signed up for a Reddit account (they’re free), you can join our subreddit and submit links to it. Links can be to anything even vaguely anime-, manga-, or Japan-related: news on an up-and-coming anime you’re looking forward to; an anime review that you found particularly noteworthy or humorous; news of an upcoming anime convention; or some fan art that you found and you really like (keep it clean please). Whatever. And you can either up- or down-vote other peoples’ stories: if someone submits a really cool picture, or a story that you like or think is particularly noteworthy, up-vote it; and if someone submitted something that is absolute crap, or spam, or off-topic, or whatever, give it a down-vote. The idea is that if a story gets enough votes then we can talk about it on the blog or podcast. And as for the problem we had in the past with scoundrels spammers, I am hopeful that, with Reddit hosting this, that spammer accounts will be kept to a minimum (and/or that they at least provide some tools to help us fight the spam).